A portable storage device, such as a portable music player, smartphone, etc., can be connected with a host, such as a personal computer or laptop over a universal serial bus (USB) link. When these two devices are connected, information between the host and the portable storage device can be communicated using a vendor-specific packet-oriented multiplexing protocol. For example, multimedia files, applications, contact information, etc. can be transferred between the two devices.
In one scenario, the host and portable storage device can multiplex USB and transmission control protocol (TCP)/Internet protocol (IP) communications over the USB link coupling the two devices. In this scenario, a network interface is configured on the USB link to enable TCP/IP-type communication over the USB link. This network interface can be used to communicate TCP/IP packets on this link. By enabling the TCP/IP-type communication, a disruption in the link can be gracefully handled. For example, an application on each of the host and the portable storage can establish a TCP session between these two applications, which is used to communicate data between the two applications. The TCP stack notifies the applications if there is a disconnection in the session, presumably caused by a disconnection in the underlying USB link. The host and portable device applications can use the notifications to gracefully recover from the communication disruption.